


left shark

by magneticwave



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Rock Band, F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-06
Updated: 2015-02-06
Packaged: 2018-03-10 17:50:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3298742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magneticwave/pseuds/magneticwave
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How To Become A Meme In Five Easy Steps!</p>
            </blockquote>





	left shark

**Author's Note:**

> sorry

_Step One: Be competent enough at your job to nab plane space when your boss’ girlfriend is hired to play the Mother Fucking Super Bowl._

~

Although the contract was obviously cemented a million years ago, Stiles still gets a little frisson of genuine excitement when Kira officially tweets that she’s playing the Super Bowl.

“The motherfucking Super Bowl!” Stiles hisses in Scott’s ear, holding onto Scott’s shoulders so tightly that his fingernails hurt. “The mother—fucking— _Super Bowl_.”

Scott says, “Yeah,” with, like, genuine stars in his eyes. He’s watching Kira, who’s pacing around her and Scott’s living room as she offers various word choices aloud. Tweeting big announcements always turns out to be a group endeavor; if left to her own devices, Kira will end up with complicated five-part tweets that are super cute but also, like, hard to retweet succinctly.

“’So excited to be playing the big stage,’” Kira reads. “Should I capitalize ‘big’ and ‘stage’ and then do, like, hashtag Super Bowl?”

Even though he can hear this high-pitched whining in his ears that sounds a little bit like Jackson Whittemore having a shrieking drama queen fit across the Atlantic Ocean, Stiles recovers enough to say, “You can do better than that, Kira.”

“But that gives me a lot of character space for emoji options,” Kira points out. She’s wearing leggings with bright green cartoon cacti on them and it’s hard for Stiles to look at her for very long. God, she’s going to play the Super Bowl and she’s probably going to, like, dress as Wonder Woman and it’s going to be _great_.

“What kind of emojis?” Scott prompts. Even though he cashed in his nursing degree to be Kira’s kept man and the occasional cover of a _People Magazine_ expose—last month Scott was apparently throwing a hissy fit in Sydney about how his allowance from Kira wasn’t enough to keep him in designer sneakers, which had been hilarious on so many levels that Stiles hadn’t even been able to yell at any of his media staff interns, he’d been laughing so hard—Scott looks like he’s the international rock star, he’s so happy.

Stiles is genuinely pleased for him. Bros support bros, especially when bros take time off of college and normal adulthood to be their best bro’s personal assistant / famous person wrangler.

“I don’t know,” Kira says, biting her lip. “I’m kind of really into sharks right now, but that would be weird, right? Are the Sharks a football team?”

“Hockey,” Scott and Stiles say in unison; they promptly fist-bump without looking. “There are Dolphins, though,” Scott adds. “So maybe no dolphins.”

“Right, no dolphins,” Kira says. She wriggles her nose at Scott. “Besides, dolphins are freaky. Have you ever swum with dolphins? They try to—” Rather than say it, Kira pretends to grind up on free air. Despite being an international rock star contracted to play the goddamn fucking Super Bowl, she looks like a preteen at her first Homecoming dance.

“Yeah, babe,” says Scott, “that’s exactly what they do,” and then he and Kira are pretending to be dolphins grinding up on unsuspecting tourists in the middle of their living room and Stiles is left to draft Kira’s tweet on his own.

He leaves in the shark, though, which means everything that happens after that is his own damn fault.

~

_Step Two: Authorize somebody to order take-out sushi for pre-show meal, ostensibly “following a theme” but in reality “cementing your fate.”_

~

“Wow,” Kira says after her first bite of the spicy octopus roll. “This is, like, genuinely terrible.”

“Excuse you,” Stiles replies instantly through his own mouthful of freshwater eel. “This is the best sushi available for anybody who wants ten platters of it delivered to a stadium in the middle of fucking nowhere.”

“It’s not good,” Scott admits. He’s somewhere between his fifth and sixth piece of yellowtail and he looks like it’s not exactly a hardship for him to be putting it away. “But I also haven’t eaten an entire scoop of wasabi yet, so it’s definitely my least traumatizing sushi experience ever.”

Kira leans over to pat his hand and says, “I’m happy for that.” She’s not even being sarcastic. Considering that Stiles spends 90% of his time being a huge asshole, it’s impressive how many genuinely nice people he’s managed to trick into being his friends.

Scott and Kira continue to hold hands; it’s a deeply tender moment and Stiles Instagrams it, because Sneakergate isn’t going to fix itself.

From her spot on the floor, Allison points out, “If you get soy sauce on that dress, Lydia will be really upset.” She’s sitting with her legs crumpled up in a way that looks deeply uncomfortable to Stiles and is eating all of the shrimp tempura. Stiles had tried to grab a piece and she’d threatened to stab him in the hand with a chopstick.

Kira looks down at her dress—which is blindingly white under the lights of her dressing room—and then makes a face. “Would anybody be really uncomfortable if I take this off?” she asks, and obviously nobody does—Scott because he sees her naked all the time, Stiles because Kira is not an asshole and therefore not his type, and Allison and the rest of the dancers because they also see Kira mostly-naked all the time.

Rock stars. What a life.

Lydia shows up with a rack of wigs and leggings an hour before kickoff, when all that’s left of the sushi platters are a few sad pieces of rice and chunks of wasabi. “If everyone is done stuffing themselves with poor decisions,” Lydia says from the doorway, “we need left and right sharks out for final fittings. Turtles over by the mirrors, jellyfish by the couches, and rainbow fish with Malia for scale gluing.” The dancers all climb to their feet and scatter to their various destinations; Allison’s cheeks are still bulging with her ill-gotten tempura when she passes Lydia in the doorway and kisses her quickly.

“Dude,” Stiles says to Scott when they’re mostly alone with the wasabi. “Can you believe it?” He means that Kira’s weird shark obsession has turned into some kind of oceanic carnival monstrosity. The costumes are mostly tasteful, of course, with Lydia in charge, but Kira’s going to be riding a mirrored surfboard out to the stage on a wave of hundreds of people wearing bodysuits in varying shades of blue. There’s a limit to taste when it’s the Super Bowl.

“No, man,” Scott says. “Kira’s mom called me yesterday and told me that she’s really proud of Kira but I wasn’t allowed to say anything until after the show, in case it jinxed the Seahawks and she had to kill me.”

Stiles’ phone beeps aggressively at the same time that Kira yells, from underneath the dual machinations of Danielle and Heather, “Can somebody tune my guitar?” Heather, who’s trying to glue scales onto Kira’s cheekbones, does not look happy with her moving. “Scott? Can you make sure my guitar’s tuned?”

“On it, babe!” Scott shouts back, even though he’s like two feet away and Kira’s looking right at him.

 _YOU NEED TO COME IMMEDIATELY_ , the text message preview from Lydia reads. Stiles has barely put his thumb down to swipe to unlock his phone when, _IMMEDIATELY_ and _NOT JOKING STILES_ follow in quick succession.

The fourth text is from Malia; it’s just a picture of a puddle of vomit.

“Aw, fuck,” Stiles says, to nobody, because Scott has left to tune Kira’s guitar and everybody else in the room is busy doing their job.

~

_Step Three: Be the same approximate dimensions of the classically trained dancer you just had indirectly poisoned, hashtag right place, right time._

~

As Malia is zipping him into the suit, Stiles says, “I really can’t emphasize enough how terrible an idea this is.”

“Lydia’s too short,” Malia says, tugging on the side zipper. “I’m too bootylicious. Allison is right shark. You tried to murder Patricia and Bobbi.”

“What about Erica?” Stiles asks desperately. Malia hasn’t closed the part over his face yet, which means she at least has to pretend to be listening to him.

“Erica’s first jellyfish,” Malia says with zero empathy or understanding. “This is like the easiest job. Just follow Allison’s lead.” She pulls the hood up over his head and starts zipping and snapping things closed. Stiles had never thought that the sound of costume snaps would herald his doom; to be completely honest, he was always pretty sure it was going to be police sirens.

“What lead?” Stiles gripes. “I can’t see anything.” That’s a lie, since he can see through the gap in the teeth, but he has zero peripheral vision and it’s not like they’re ‘right slightly more forward’ shark and ‘left slightly more backward’ shark. “Malia. Seriously. This is a really bad idea.”

“Didn’t Lydia give you two shots of tequila?” Malia demands. “Oh my god, just nut the hell up and get your ass out there, left shark. Kira looks like a sea goddess of rock, nobody’s going to care about you.” Malia steps back, just enough that Stiles can see all of her through the black mesh of the shark suit’s mouth, and she nods thoughtfully. “Lydia’s right, same measurements as Bobbi.”

Stiles has never been less grateful for his willowy and nubile figure. “It’s just—like, waving my arms, right?” he says, doing a few experimental sweeps. “Nothing fancy? No _Dirty Dancing_ lifts? I’m not having the time of my life, right?”

Malia, who has no appreciation for eighties classics or Stiles’ bullshit, says, “If you try to lift Kira on stage I will set this suit on fire with you still inside of it.”

“Great,” Stiles says. “Good pep talk.”

~

_Step Four: ???_

~

Stiles hasn’t been onstage with Kira since high school, when she was playing Battle of the Bands stuff around Beacon Hills and Stiles’ jeep was essentially her tour bus. Back then, whenever Danny had a biochem exam and couldn’t make a show, Stiles would sit in front of a snare drum and attempt to keep beat as Kira picked through her short repertoire of perky murder anthems.

Stiles is about as good at being left shark as he’d been at drummer, but he’s had plenty of practice drunkenly dancing to Kira’s music with Scott at her shows. It turns out to be an unexpected blessing that he can’t see anything, because jamming out in a stuffy polyester shark suit is a lot easier when you don’t have constant reminders that half the population of the United States is watching avidly.

Kira’s singing about summer days and winter nights and relationships that are important for different seasons. It’s not one of her more intellectual songs but Stiles lets it speak to him, tries to really get into the mood of the music. He’s kicking that stupid winter boyfriend out to the curb and waving a frantic welcome to summer boyfriend, who is obviously Scott.

Getting a little method with it, Stiles imagines that Scott is out there in the audience, trying to fight through the arrivals crowd at LAX. _Come on, bro_ , Stiles waves expansively. _Welcome back to the summer of Kira’s love!_ He tries some hip thrusts because why not. Sharks have hips, probably.

~

_Step Five: Profit._

~

“I’m going to murder you,” Lydia says to Stiles on the plane back to LA, “and Malia’s going to hide your body, and no one in the world will prosecute me for it.”

Across the aisle, Kira is nibbling on her lip and typing into her phone. “Would tweeting another shark emoji be insensitive?” she asks Allison.

“Malia’s the one who told me nobody would notice anything I did!” Stiles says. He doesn’t think Lydia would go through the actual effort of murdering him, since exerting herself unduly isn’t really her style, but he doesn’t trust her not to pay one of the flight attendants to push him out of the plane somewhere over Idaho.

“If Kira’s disinvited from performing at the Grammies, I will make her a coat from your skin,” Lydia promises.

“Um, noted,” Stiles says, making a horrified face at her. “Thanks, Lydia, really appropriate response to a little tiny gaffe.”

“#LeftShark is _trending on Twitter_ ,” Lydia shouts at him. “Do your job and fix this!”

From the window seat next to Kira, Scott says, “I mean, nobody’s said anything to me about Zanotti in twelve hours, so at least he killed Sneakergate.”

Stiles points emphatically to Scott and says, “I killed Sneakergate! Scott, give me a raise.”

“Totally, bro,” Scott says, air-fist bumping him from across the plane.

“I’m going to make you into a coat, and it’s going to make Stella McCartney weep tears of blood,” Lydia says.


End file.
